SAVE TO MY LIBRARY

The Boston Opportunity Agenda: Fifth Annual Report Card

Here you will find the most up-to-date information available on Boston's education pipeline, from kindergarten through college graduation, including measures for school readiness, 3rd-grade reading proficiency, 10th-grade academic proficiency, high school completion, dropout rates, college enrollment and completion rates for youth and adults.

The measures for the public systems—the Boston Public Schools and Boston's Charter public schools—use the state assessments. The data is gathered from the Boston Public Schools, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Archdiocese of Boston. Given the different sizes of the student populations in these systems, this year we have included the number of actual students represented by the percentages for each measure in each chart. We hope this will allow for a deeper and more accurate understanding of the measures, aid in interpreting rapid shifts in the percentages, whether positive or negative, and temper comparisons across systems until we have better methods for comparing measures with significantly different sample sizes. The Archdiocese of Boston uses the Northwest Evaluation Association Measures of Academic Progress (NWEA).

This report card also marks the final update on our initial goals for the Boston Public Schools in high school completion and dropout reduction. While short of our initial five-year goal of 80% for high school completion, the current 66.7% is higher than the national average for urban school systems and represents a jump of five percentage points from the baseline set in 2008. Meanwhile the annual dropout rate narrowly missed the five-year goal of less than 3%, coming in at 3.8%. Having started at 7.3%, this is a tremendous achievement. It reflects the hard work of many partners and it represents a promising start for hundreds of young people annually.

Over the coming year, we will be working with representatives of the Boston Public Schools, the Archdiocese of Boston and Boston's Charter public schools in partnership with the Boston Compact to set new five-year goals for each of the currently identified measures and collectively agree on common measures of progress. We will also work to identify a common measure for middle school, a critical time in the life of a young person that currently has no measure. These changes will enable all stakeholders—students, families, nonprofit partners and educators at all levels—to have a better understanding of the health of Boston's education pipeline and identify areas where we must redouble our efforts to ensure excellence in education for all Boston's students at all levels and in every system dedicated to serving them.